Goddesses in Everywoman: A New Psychology of Women

I wrote Goddesses in Everywoman as a psychology of women, that has over the past fifteen years since I wrote it, become something of a classic. I've been told how useful it has been to facilitate discussions between mothers and daughters, sisters, and friends about their differences and similarities. It's helped men understand the significant women in their lives (something women who have given the book to husbands and lovers, with chapters or passages marked, hoped would happen). It's a book that has become a text in a very wide variety of courses from high school to graduate school, in mythology, psychology, women's studies, literature, creative writing, drama, and counseling, and had a major influence in women's spirituality. Its perspective and mine is Jungian, feminist, spiritual, clinical, right brain and left. I wish that women readers would also read Gods in Everyman , for a complete understanding of themselves. I think that just about every woman who does so, will find an aspect of herself in a god-archetype, which completes her internal pantheon. For example, Hermes (Mercury) the messenger god, is a very significant archetype in me. I have the exploratory energy of Artemis, but it is Hermes that puts what I learn in words and makes the intuitive connections. Besides Gods in Everyman , two of my other books are related. Ring of Power (a new edition will be published February 1999) based on Richard Wagner's operatic Ring Cycle, focuses on dysfunctional family relationships between these same archetypes (with different names). In Crossing to Avalon, I wrote about my pilgrimage to sacred sites and what I experienced of goddess spirituality. A "sequel" to Goddesses in Everywoman is in the works -- I am now writing Goddesses in Older Women . Jean Shinoda Bolen, M.D. is a an internationally known Jungian analyst and author of Goddesses in Everywoman (Greek goddesses and feminine archetypes), and Gods in Everyman (Greek gods and masculine archetypes), The Tao of Psychology (on synchronicity), Ring of Power (about archetypes, symbols, and themes in Wagner's Ring Cycle, a Jungian-feminist interpretation), Crossing to Avalon (on pilgrimage, goddess spirituality, midlife), and Close to the Bone: Life Threatening Illness and the Search for Meaning . She is clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California Medical Center San Francisco, a Fellow of the American Psychiatric Association and the American Academy of Psychoanalysis, and a former board member of the Ms. Foundation for Women and the International Transpersonal Association. She has been involved in the Healing Journeys: Cancer as a Turing Point Conferences, and was in two acclaimed documentaries, the Canadian Film Board's Goddess Remembered, and the academy award winning anti-nuclear film, Women--For America, For the World. She is currently writing Goddesses in Older Women (about archetypes, spirituality, and authenticity in women over fifty) and The Millionth Circle: How to Change Ourselves and the World (on women's circles).